Evaluation on the thermal and mechanical properties of HNT toughened epoxycarbon fibre composites.pdfVIP

Composites: Part B 42 (2011) 2145–2150 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Composites: Part B journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/compositesb Evaluation on the thermal and mechanical properties of HNT-toughened epoxy/carbon fibre composites Yueping Ye a, Haibin Chen a, Jingshen Wu a,⇑, Chi Ming Chan b,c a Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China b Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China c Division of Environment, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Halloysite nanotubes (HNT) were effectively incorporated into epoxy resin and used for infusion of car- Received 3 January 2011 bon fibre textiles, resulting in epoxy/halloysite nanotube/carbon fibre (EP/HNT/CF) multi-scale compos- Received in revised form 2 March 2011 ites. The distribution of nanotubes in the composites was examined by SEM. The thermomechanical Accepted 2 March 2011 properties of the composites were characterized by dynamic mechanical analyser (DMA). A 25% enhance- Available online 8 May 2011 ment was recorded for the storage modulus of EP/HNT/CF composite in the glassy state. Moreover, the Tg of the laminates increased with the addition of HNT, and the values were even higher than the Tg of their Keywords: